What is 'The Precariat'? What Do I Mean By 'Denizen'?

I think Guy Standing does a better job of explaining this than I ever could

Having changed the title of my blog from 'Citizen Zero' to 'Denizen One', and floated the idea of a new emerging class 'the precariat', it's probably high time I explained exactly what I mean.

Here is an extract from Guy Standing's book 'The Precariat: A New Dangerous Class'

"Varieties of precariat

However one defines it, the precariat is far from being homogeneous. The teenager who flits in and out of the internet café while surviving on fleeting jobs is not the same as the migrant who uses his wits to survive, networking feverishly while worrying about the police. Neither is similar to the single mother fretting where the money for next week’s food bill is coming from or the man in his 60’s who takes casual jobs to help pay medical bills. But they all share a sense that their labour is instrumental (to live), opportunistic (taking what comes) and precarious (insecure).

One way of depicting the precariat is as ‘denizens’

A denizen is someone who, for one reason or another, has a more limited range of rights than citizens do. The idea of the denizen, which can be traced back to Roman times, has been applied to foreigners given residency rights and rights to ply their trade, but not full citizenship rights.

The idea can be extended by thinking of the range of rights to which people are entitled – civil (equality before the law and right to protection against crime and physical harm), cultural (equal access to enjoyment of culture and entitlement to participate in the cultural life of the community), social (equal access to forms of social protection, including pensions and health care), economic (equal entitlement to undertake income-earning activity) and political (equal right to vote, stand for elections and participate in the political life of the community). A growing number of people around the world lack at least one of these rights, and as such belong top the ‘denizenry’ rather than the citizenry, wherever they are living.

The concept could also be extended to corporate life, with corporate citizens and denizens of various types. The salariat can be seen as citizens with at least implicit voting rights in the firm, covering a range of decision and practices that the other groups of citizens, the shareholders and owners, implicitly accept while having their own explicit voting rights on the strategic decisions in the firm. The rest of those connected to corporations – the temps, casuals, dependent contractors and so on – are denizens, with few entitlements or rights.

In the wider world, most denizens are migrants of one kind or another, and they will be considered later. However, one other category stands out – the large layer of people who have been criminalised, the convicted. The globalisation era has seen a growth in the number of actions deemed to be criminal. More people are arrested and more are incarcerated than ever before, resulting in more people being criminalised than ever before. Part of the expansion of criminalisation is due to petty crime, including behavioural reactions to social assistance schemes that create immoral hazards, situations in which deprived people risk penalising themselves if they tell the truth and thus fall foul of some bureaucratic rule.

Temporary career-less workers, migrant denizens, criminalised strugglers, welfare claimants...the numbers mount up. Unfortunately, labour and economic statistics are not presented in a way that could allow us to estimate the total number of people in the precariat, let alone the number in the varieties that make up its ranks. We have to build a picture on the basis of proxy variables."
~Guy Standing, The Precariat: A New Dangerous Class

That gives you a rough idea of what I mean by precariat, and why it is I often feel more like a denizen than a citizen.

It is this feeling of disenfranchisement that has led me to choose to be creatively maladjusted to everyday society. Inspired by this speech by Martin Luthor King Jr., I consider myself to be not only a member of the precariat, but also a proud member of The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjqzG-QCX-Q&feature=share